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November 26, 2014

Distorting the News of Jerusalem Terror

published at Honest Reporting

Inaccurate and distorting one-liners easily can be
corrected. After complaints, CNN edited
and apologized for both the completely false headline, “Deadly attack on
Jerusalem mosque” and the disturbingly misleading, “4 Israelis, Two
Palestinians dead in Jerusalem.”

But, the systemic distortions through which media view
Israel are much harder to change.

In a moment of impatience and candor, a BBC reporter
interrupted Knesset Member Naftali Bennett’s short interview about the horrific
slaughter that morning of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Avrahm Goldberg, Arye Kopinsky,
and Kalman Levine while they were praying in their Jerusalem synagogue: “We don’t
want to actually see that picture, if you could take that down.”

BBC
preferred not to “actually see” nor show its viewers a terror victim wrapped in
tallit and tefillin lying on a blood splattered floor after two Palestinians
had stormed the synagogue, shot people point blank, and hacked at them with
axes and knives.

We can’t know what was in the reporter’s mind; we do know
from analysis of how Israel is often framed in mainstream American and British
media that the reporter most likely was trying to get on with the story.

That is, she did not want or need to see Bennett’s photo
since the framework for her story was already in place. The story of the Har
Nof terror would be about “tensions boiling” in Jerusalem and “revenge.”

When terrorists murder Israelis, prestigious news outlets
often package the terrorism into familiar and fallacious storylines. Readers’
attention is directed away from the actual violence and toward the features of
predictable news frames: in this case into the false analogy of a “cycle”
of violence and the image of Israel as the region’s “neighborhood bully.”

In fact, BBC
spells out its guiding misinterpretations in a “background”
summary: “Synagogue attack: Months of tension and revenge attacks” that among
other errors, simply leaves out Hamas’s rocket firing on Israeli civilians as a
catalyst for this summer’s war.

In its gallery of photos of the synagogue massacre, Associated
Press does not include a single picture of the devastation itself, though
many such photographs were available from Israeli news outlets and across
social media. By contrast, BBC and AP did not shy away from graphic imagery
during the Gaza war. Indeed, they seemed to seek out casualties, replaying
scenes from Gaza endlessly.

These storylines are built from distortions. No matter how
much support terrorists receive from Palestinian leaders,
other countries,
and from the specific groups
that sponsor the killing, the perpetrators appear as isolated individuals up
against the powerful State of Israel.

And bizarrely, the murder of Jews praying in a synagogue or
Israelis waiting at a bus stop is equalized with the resulting deaths of
terrorists themselves. The CNN
headline, 4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead…” alludes to this pattern.

Here is the New York Times:“It brought to 11 the number of Israelis — including a baby, a
soldier and a border police officer — killed in the past month.

“In the same period, Israeli security forces killed a
Palestinian citizen of Israelwho had approached
their car with a knife, setting off days of rioting; shot dead two drivers who
plowed their cars into pedestrians in Jerusalem; and killed a suspect in an attempted
assassination… “

The phrase, “in the same time period” suggests that there
have been killings on both sides. But the deaths of terrorists – here called
“drivers,” -- occurred because they were in the act of murdering people at
random. The other altercations are included to bolster the cycle storyline.

Like the BBC, the New York Times makes clear their
perspective in their own news analysis that includes this unsupported (and
unsupportable) claim:
“extremists on both sides seem to be acting increasingly beyond the control of
Israeli and Palestinian leaders.”

The fifth Israeli killed at Har Nof was Police Master
Sargent Zidan Saif, a
member of the Druze community. He died in a shootout with the terrorists while
heroically protecting fellow Israelis. Thousands of Druze and Jewish Israelis attended
his funeral.An interfaith gathering was
held outside the Har Nof synagogue complex in which Jewish, Christian and
Muslim clerics denounced terror in Jerusalem.

There are many other stories in Israel than the ones we have
become used to seeing in the press.